Five radical new ways to charge an EV in town

The cheapest solution is to use domestic electricity, but jury-rigged extension archways or on-ground cable-protectors are hardly pedestrian-friendly. One solution is the cable gully, a small metal-lined trench across the pavement to the kerbside that allows cables to be run from house to car without creating a trip hazard. In 2019, Oxford Council pitted cable gullies against other street solutions, such as charging bollards, and found they were the most utilised. 

The main downside, as with lamp-post chargers, is that a free parking space next to the gully isn’t guaranteed. The Oxford trial concluded they work well for quiet streets but “in streets with high parking pressures are unlikely to be sufficient alone”. Another solution that needs no digging up of the pavement is Dutch start-up ChargeArm’s device, which sits in your front garden and swings across to your car, leaving room for pedestrians to walk underneath.

Robot charging

Volkswagen’s idea for hasslefree charging involves robots. It first touted the idea in 2019, then refined it as a way of “avoiding costly stand-alone measures” in covered car parks. However, given the rise of delivery robots, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a couple of these patrolling urban streets. The robot sits in a bay together with a number of battery trailers, also plugged in. 

The customer orders a charge from a smartphone app, which triggers the robot to hook up a trailer, take it to their car and plug it in via its arm. No production plans have emerged so far, but Volkswagen has previously said the concept could be “made into reality quite quickly”.

Lamp-post charging

The popularity of this solution is revealed in the rise of lamp-post charger convertor Ubitricity, which now has the highest share of public chargers in the UK, at 28%, according to Zap-Map. The 5.5kW chargers aren’t quick (an 85kWh battery would take around 15 hours to fill), but fitting them to lamp-posts or bollards is a neat solution to avoid more street clutter. Ubitricity owner Shell plans to install 50,000 charging posts by the end of 2025, up from 3600 now. 

Other solutions are faster; for example, Rolec’s purpose-built Streetcharge EV street lamp has a 7.2kW charger embedded. Another clutter-free alternative is to install pop-up kerbside chargers, such as those operated by UK company Urban Electric. The downside of lamp-post chargers is their wide spacing means the adjacent parking spots can quickly become occupied on a busy street (including by ICE cars), forcing you to look elsewhere.

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